Book of Veles

The Book of Veles (also: Veles Book, Vles book, Vlesbook, Isenbeck's Planks, Велесова книга, Велесова књига, Велес книга, Книга Велеса, Дощечки Изенбека, Дощьки Изенбека) is a literary forgery purporting to be a text of ancient Slavic religion and history supposedly written on wooden planks.

It contains religious passages and accounts of history interspersed with religious morals. The earliest events in the book could be dated around the 7th century BC and the latest happened in the 9th century AD.

The book was allegedly discovered in 1919 and lost in 1941. It is widely held by scholars to be a forgery made in the 1940s–1950s or, less likely, in the early 19th century. The main decisive evidence is the language of the text which is a mixture of different modern Slavic languages with erroneous and invented forms and no regular grammar. Moreover, different modern editions of the book have different versions of its text. Regardless, some Slavic neopagans use it as their sacred text.

Most of the scholars that specialize in the field of mythological studies and Slavic linguistics (such as Boris Rybakov, Andrey Zaliznyak, Leo Klein, and all Russian academic historians and linguists) consider it a forgery. According to these scholars the thorough analysis of the book shows that it was written sometime in the 20th century. The history of the book can be reliably traced only as far as mid-1950s, when the transcribed book and the photograph of one of the planks first appeared in a San Francisco-based, Russian émigré newspaper. Several scholars believe that the entire book is a product of collaboration of the editors of this newspaper and Yuriy Mirolyubov, who later claimed to have found the book. Others believe that either the entire book or the only plank available, were forged in the early 19th century by the Russian collector and forger Alexander Sulakadzev.

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